This project enables natural language search for photos on Unsplash, leveraging OpenAI's CLIP model. It's designed for users who want to find images based on descriptive text rather than traditional tags, offering a more intuitive and semantic search experience.

How It Works

The core of the system uses OpenAI's CLIP neural network, which maps both images and text into a shared latent space. This allows for similarity comparisons between text descriptions and image content. The project pre-computes feature vectors for a large portion of the Unsplash dataset (nearly 2 million photos) using CLIP. When a user enters a natural language query, the system converts the query into a CLIP feature vector and finds the closest matching image vectors from the pre-computed dataset.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Installation: pip install -r requirements.txt
• Prerequisites: Python, CLIP code, Unsplash Dataset (Lite version publicly available; Full version requires free access application).
• Execution: Run numbered Jupyter notebooks (01-setup-clip.ipynb, 02-download-unsplash-dataset.ipynb, 03-process-unsplash-dataset.ipynb, 04-search-image-dataset.ipynb, 09-search-image-api.ipynb).
• Colab: A Google Colab notebook is available for quick experimentation.
• Resources: Processing the full dataset with CLIP is computationally intensive.

Highlighted Details

• Utilizes OpenAI's CLIP model for semantic image-text matching.
• Processes a large dataset (nearly 2 million photos) for comprehensive search.
• Offers two search modes: direct dataset search and API search with CLIP filtering.
• Inspired by advancements in semantic search for images.

Maintenance & Community

No specific information on maintainers, community channels, or roadmap is provided in the README.

Licensing & Compatibility

The README does not explicitly state the license for the project's code or the dataset usage. Compatibility for commercial use or closed-source linking is not specified.

Limitations & Caveats

The full Unsplash dataset requires a separate application for access. Searching via the Unsplash API without the full dataset may yield less accurate results. The computational requirements for processing the dataset are significant.